Hacking EZFlash III 1GB Formatting Issues

[BrainSlugs83]

An issue, and some general "Idiots Guide" questions.

The "I'm an Idiot" Questions:
1.1.) I've owned thumb drivers before, and it was my understanding that flash drives were not volatile; Why does the thing need to be charged? -- Also, I have it plugged into the linker right now and plugged in -- will being plugged into the USB port (green light is solid, red is blinking -- more on that later) charge the cartridge?

1.2.) I bought the 1GB version -- EZ Flash III says it's 256 Mb -- which is only 32MB? -- Am I crazy?

-- It appears to have a main area for programs, and then a flash disk for save files, pictures, and text... can someone confirm that these two areas are seperate? How big is the flash disk area? (I don't see it advertized.) -- Is the flash drive a subset of the 1GB? (ex: I really have 896MB for programs, and 128MB for flash disk?) -- Why are they seperate?
[EDIT]This is the product I bought, http://www.jandaman.com/games.mvc?p=gbaezf..._code=GBADEVKIT -- so it's really 1 Gb, but that's still 128 MB, not 32... so I'm still confused[/EDIT]

1.3.) I've been programming for over 10 years -- game programming with Allegro also (C/C++ are native to me, also I took the time to learn PIC assembly language a while back...) -- Are there any guides to get me started on GBA programming?

The "I don't speak chinese and can't read the error message (yes, I chose english, I'm using EZManager 2.2)" Questions:

2.1.) Using EZ_MODE I changed the mode to EZ Flash III (From 1/2), and was able to update the cart's OS thanks to an italian GBA forum, and google translator, and a bunch of italians that knew what was up with the product -- but when I go to format the drive, even if I use the smallest size (128 MB), it gets to about 90% waits a minute, then throws up with an error message with weird symbols -- not chinese characters, but I bet if I was using a unicode font they'd be. And now the red light is blinking non-stop.

 

[FAST6191]

1.1) There is a battery that holds stuff in the save ram before transferring it on boot.

1.2) There is a NOR section made of fast memory and there is a 1gigabit (128mbyte) section that requires GBA code be transferred first.

1.3) http://forum.gbadev.org/index.php
http://nocash.emubase.de/gbatek.htm should start you off.
There are numerous threads around here as well, the GBA uses an ARM7tdmi processor.

2.1) Try an earlier version of the client, 2.2 focused mainly on DS stuff. Also try EZCheck (a standalone EZ3 formatting app):

Earlier versions:
http://ezflash.sosuke.com/viewforum.php?f=2

Oh and here are the US forums:
http://ezflash.sosuke.com/

 

[BrainSlugs83]

I actually got most of the hardware stuff sorted out... It all seems to be happy and working now -- sometimes the light blinks red when it's been sitting a while -- I'm still not sure if that means it's charging, or if that means that there's a problem. It seems to work well, and I'm loading it with junk now... I'm going to check the links you provided for 1.3 since that's where my main interest lies now...

I have devkitpro/arm installed; But I can't figure out the commandline arguments to pass to "arm-eabi-gcc.exe" to produce an elf file. :-/ So hopefully I'll find something on one of those links.

Cheers!

[Edit]
Badass! I was able to find that the commandline I need is:
arm-eabi-gcc.exe x.cpp -Wall -O2 -mthumb -mthumb-interwork -specs=gba_mb.specs -ox.elf
followed by
arm-eabi-objcopy -O binary x.elf x.gba

[/Edit]

 

[dexmix]

sweet looks like FAST covered all your issues. good luck with the dev!!!


note: don't forget that you can only load GBA roms

 

[BrainSlugs83]

It's weird that I've heard the two sections of the disk called NAND and NOR -- arn't those logic gates? Why are the sections of the flash rom referred to as such?

 

[FAST6191]

They are logic gates but they are also forms of memory called as such at the transistor level they look like the gates they are named for.